Advice from the Hermit Issue #2: The True Nature of Love

Okay...a question that has vexed everyone alive at one point or another in their lives: What is love?  Those people that write the dictionaries tend to focus on the chemical and biological aspects; poets, songwriters, and other various writers focus on the feelings it inspires.  But neither group has really defined it.


Love is the ultimate paradox.  A paradox of logic, of feelings, and of life.  This is why it is so impossible to define; it is something different to everyone.  Well, honestly, that isn't true.  The shape it takes is different for everyone, but the main premise is the same regardless of who you are, male, female, whatever.  And therein lies the first paradox.  It is the same but it is always different.  Which leads into the all of the other paradoxes.  It is the most selfish, and the most selfless, of feelings.  It is the desire to make someone happy, which is truly selfless, but it is the desire for you to be the one that makes them happy; which is selfish.  It is also allowing someone else to be the source of your happiness (which is sort of selfless, though not very greatly), and for them to make you happy (which is definitely selfish).  It is a complicated emotion, but also a very simple one.  Even when it ends, for whatever reason, it is still a sense of happy nostalgia but also a source of great emotional pain and sorrow.


Love is the "bipolar" of emotions.  It exists at the extreme ends of so many different spectrum that I doubt you could count them all.  Try experiencing everything there is to experience about love, and you will spend the rest of eternity at the attempt.